


The Struck Bell

by quigonejinn



Category: Marvel (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-14
Updated: 2013-02-14
Packaged: 2017-11-29 05:22:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/683309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jean Grey inside Steve Rogers's head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Struck Bell

Jean Grey inside Steve Rogers's head. 

Halfway through the dethaw, SHIELD calls in a favor and sends Jean Grey into Steve Rogers's head. This isn't their first rodeo; they want to make sure they've got the real deal. They want to make sure that he is still sane, too. When Jean arrives inside his head, she finds herself under a broad dome, like in a building in DC. Promising. Sunlight comes in through windows set high in the curve, and around the edges, she sees art projects left abandoned. Dusty. Overturned. Less promising. 

Jean walks over to a pile of scrap metal lying next to what looks like a welder's mask. A few pieces have been shaped into something like a man's torso, and after considering it for a while, considering the sunlight from outside, the clean air that smells a little dusty, she raps her knuckle against it. 

It resounds like a struck bell, a deep sound out of proportion to its size, and it does the trick. A few minutes later, a girl comes into the dome from one of the arches. Human, which is promising. Dressed in the clothes of the 1940's, but fuzzy at the edges. Promising, too, because it suggests the last time this person was conscious was then. Jean didn't see any references in the file to who the girl could be. A sister? Steve Rogers didn't have a sister. 

"You're trying to wake him up," the girl says. She has a little bit of an accent that Jean can't quite place. 

"I'm seeing if they should continue waking him up."

They consider each other for a long time. Dark blonde hair in a long braid down her back. Dark eyes. Brown saddle shoes. Jean saw in the file that Steve Rogers spent some time in Portugal, hunting HYDRA agents trying to escape from the downfall of the Reich, but the accent doesn't sound Portuguese. The girl sounds American, for the most part. 

"Do you want to see him?" the girl says, finally. 

"Yes," Jean says. 

So the girl takes her through the hallways, and Jean sees more of the villa, which is open to the sun (good) and filled with incomplete art projects (not so good, though consistent with the file description of Steve Rogers). As they get deeper into the complex, Jean notices that the piles in the hallways start to have military things: boots, rifles, a helmet. A radio pack the size of a man's torso, lying abandoned on marble steps that lead down and out through a pair of bronze doors. 

Jean pauses and studies the traces of what look like dried blood heading down the steps and towards the doors. 

The girl sees her pause. "It isn't a safe memory," she says and points. Now that Jean looks more carefully, she can see where it looks like shells of some kind have hit the doors. On the radio pack, the front has been smashed in order to render it inoperative and to obscure the channels on which it broadcast. The air is cool throughout the building, but it's noticeably cooler here: a chill seems to come up through the doors. 

"Are you only supposed to show me safe memories?"

The girl considers Jean. It's a strangely assessing look from someone who appears to be all of nine years old, who has a braid halfway down her back and red barrettes on either side of her face. "You're here to see whether he's fit to let out, aren't you?" she says. 

"So he knows that he's somewhere he needs to be let out?"

The girl turns around for a moment and looks at Jean as though she is trying to decide exactly how stupid Jean is, then goes back to walking: _I can pursue this later_ , Jean thinks. She is aware, too, of the dubious moral ground that she is on: what right does she have to go through a man's head more than she needs to? SHIELD says that the world needs him, but this isn't Jean Grey's first rodeo, either. 

Eventually, Jean follows the girl into a hallway that looks like a New York office building from the 1930s; in fact, when Jean looks out the glass windows that run along the side, she sees something that looks a lot like Midtown Manhattan. They pass a room full of secretarial desks, all empty, with the covers drawn down over the typewriters.

"Steve worked at an ad agency before the war," the girl explains. "He liked it." 

They come to a light-filled studio that obviously doesn't belong to the same building, but Steve's mind links them together. Jean steps through the open door: there is a drafting table in the room, and a small, blond man with thin shoulders working at it. He wears a white shirt, gray pants, and suspenders, and he looks up when Jean comes up in. He sets his pencil down.

"How long have I been in here?" he asks. 

"A long time."

"Are we talking weeks? Months?" He pauses. "Years?"

It's unwise to lie inside another person's mind, especially when the mind might -- probably, if Jean is honest with herself -- belongs to one of the greatest superheroes in American history, one with a particular intolerance for falsehood: shade the truth, maybe, but Jean's experience has been that unless circumstances are dire and she has a full understanding of the situation, the truth is better. 

"Decades," she says gently.

The man closes his eyes, and when his eyes open, he doesn't look at Jean first. Instead, his eyes move to something behind her, and Jean turns around: the girl is gone, completely and thoroughly, without the sound of footsteps or even a ripple in the air. 

"Who was that?"

"Someone who'll never exist now," Steve Rogers says, quietly, and he slides down from his drafting stool. He goes over to a small kitchen setup in the corner of the room. A hot plate, a percolator. 

"Tell me about what's happened," he says. 

"You won't remember when you wake up. We're not really -- talking to each other in a way that your mind will retain." 

"I know. You should tell me about it anyways and explain how it's possible you're here." He reaches up and gets a can of coffee down from the shelf, then looks over at her -- not exactly shy, not exactly hesitant, but careful. Polite. Considerate, having processed the vast gap between them in time and that he might seem a little old-fashioned, decent even to the part of his brain that lay beneath language and conscious thought. 

"Do people still drink coffee?" he asks. 

"Yes," she answers, smiling, so he makes a pot of coffee and gets down two cups. 

They sit together at a card table by the window, drinking coffee. Jean tells him the good and the bad, about the terrible bombings at the end of the war and the rebuilding of Europe and Japan that followed, about the Korean and Vietnam War and Watergate and the emergence of mutants, but the slow development of American society into something that might be better, more inclusive than it had been in his day. About the fall of the Berlin Wall and the American civil rights movement, but also, the long, ugly road to them. 

Steve listens and doesn't interrupt except to ask a few quiet, collected questions every now and then and to ask, periodically, if Jean wanted more coffee: later, when she thinks about it, Jean realizes that this is the moment when she accepted that this skinny boy with war memories actually was Captain America, that he had survived the ice sane and ready to lead, and that Captain American was, in fact, what legend said he would be. She did not need to lie to SHIELD to protect him from an organization that wanted to use him. He was capable of finding out and deciding on his own whether he wanted to be a part of it. 

Still, though, when Jean passes the drafting table to take a cup of coffee from Steve's hand, she looks over her shoulder. She sees what he had been drawing, and when she looks back at Steve, she realizes he is studying her. Watching for her reaction. 

Jean lets her breath out slowly and thinks of the girl who led her to the man who was once and would again be Captain America. 

_Someone who'll never exist now._

The girl had Steve Rogers's hair and Peggy Carter's eyes.


End file.
